macOS¶

macOS has no in-box USB/IP client, and no vhci-hcd equivalent to install. One experimental third-party client exists, but it only runs with System Integrity Protection turned off - so for most people the practical way to give a Mac a virtual device is a hardware client, which needs nothing installed on the Mac at all.

Option	Works today	Cost
Hardware client (recommended)	yes	a $6 board; the Mac sees plain USB
`usbip-macos`	experimental	SIP must be disabled
Serve from macOS	yes	the other machine gets the device
Drive from code	yes	no USB stack involvement

`usbip-macos` (experimental)¶

carlossless/usbip-macos is a USB/IP client written in Rust. It creates the virtual controller through Apple's IOUSBHostControllerInterface rather than a kext, and its author describes it as "highly experimental… just enough working to work my current usecases"

It needs SIP disabled

IOUSBHostControllerInterface is gated behind the com.apple.developer.usb.host-controller-interface entitlement, which Apple grants only on request. Without it the process must run as root on a Mac with System Integrity Protection turned off (csrutil disable from Recovery). That lowers the security posture of the whole machine - do it on a scratch Mac or a VM, not on a daily driver. Prefer the hardware client if you can.

Build it with cargo, then attach by busid or by VID:PID:

cargo build --release

sudo ./target/release/usbip-macos -r 192.168.0.5 list
sudo ./target/release/usbip-macos -r 192.168.0.5 attach --busid 1-1
sudo ./target/release/usbip-macos -r 192.168.0.5 attach --vendor_id 0x1209 --product_id 0x0001

-p/--tcp-port selects a non-default port; the process stays in the foreground for the lifetime of the device, and detaching means stopping it. Serve on every interface so the Mac can reach you - dev.plug(via=usbip.USBIP("0.0.0.0", 3240)) - since the default local transport is loopback-only.

Serve from macOS¶

The Python library is pure Python and runs anywhere Python does, so a Mac can host the device server; a Linux or Windows machine then imports it over the network.

python3 examples/hid_device.py --host 0.0.0.0 --port 3240   # on the Mac

sudo usbip attach -r <mac-ip> -b 1-1                               # on a Linux box

(The C libraries also build on macOS - libusbip-device.0.dylib / libusbip-host.0.dylib - though that branch of the build is best-effort and not exercised by CI.)

Drive a device from macOS¶

The host API speaks USB/IP itself, so it needs no kernel support and works on macOS exactly as on Linux - see libusb-shaped transfers. Point the transport at the serving machine: usbip.USBIP("10.0.0.5", 3240).

Run existing libusb tools¶

The C libusb-1.0 wrapper targets macOS too - best-effort, as the Darwin branch of the build is untested - so a stock libusb program, or pyusb pointed at it, can drive a served device without any kernel driver. Use DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (or pass the path to pyusb's backend loader) rather than Linux's LD_PRELOAD.

Testing a Mac-only USB stack¶

If the goal is to test how macOS itself reacts to a device on an untouched system, use a hardware client, or a Linux VM that imports the device and passes it through to the Mac's virtualisation stack.